How long before we have a billion-dollar acquisition offer for a one-engineer startup?
The way to describe this software coding continuum might be pre-foundation – where in its extremist form, every piece of software started in Assembly — and post-foundation – where software is like Legos, just snap the pieces together.
Pre-foundation, even the simplest tasks took a tremendous amount of knowledge and labor, because you had to build up from the bottom. For a website this might have meant (going up the stack) a server OS you patched and managed yourself, running your homegrown or hand-tuned web server, caching system, database, account management system, rendering engine and front-end libraries, with your own hand built analytics platform, build process and bug reporting tool. If that sounds like a lot of stuff to manage, that’s because it was.
Post-foundation, one need only focus on the user-facing function at hand, working with only one level of abstraction. It will one day be laughable that building Facebook required tuning web server software, let alone building entire data centers. The other layers of the stack will be abstracted away entirely and writing software will continue to look more like assembling a collection of Github-hosted libraries and APIs.
[...]
But we are getting there, and software is eating software development. The foundation of open source based software platforms, infrastructure, knowledge and best practices continues to grow. I bet Stackoverflow alone has increased programming productivity by a few percentage points. Now add fifteen years of free or inexpensive developer tools (Github, too many IDEs to list), automated infrastructure (Mesosphere, AWS, Google App Engine, Heroku, DigitalOcean and more), databases (MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Firebase and more), high level languages (Python, Ruby, PHP and more) and frameworks (Meteor, Angular, Django, Rails, Bootstrap and more): the faucets, pipes and water pumps of programming. All rooted in open source and all removing levels of detail that a creator making software for users shouldn’t have to care about.
Software engineering is not yet plumbing — or Legos — because our standards are incomplete, our libraries incompatible, scaling is still not free and our software still buggy.
Now, what does this mean for the 10x engineer? The “10x engineer” is still needed to build the foundation — building AWS or Mesos remains very difficult. But as we build out the common foundation, the skill and experience an individual needs to accomplish a task on top of the platform decreases.
More Here
The way to describe this software coding continuum might be pre-foundation – where in its extremist form, every piece of software started in Assembly — and post-foundation – where software is like Legos, just snap the pieces together.
Pre-foundation, even the simplest tasks took a tremendous amount of knowledge and labor, because you had to build up from the bottom. For a website this might have meant (going up the stack) a server OS you patched and managed yourself, running your homegrown or hand-tuned web server, caching system, database, account management system, rendering engine and front-end libraries, with your own hand built analytics platform, build process and bug reporting tool. If that sounds like a lot of stuff to manage, that’s because it was.
Post-foundation, one need only focus on the user-facing function at hand, working with only one level of abstraction. It will one day be laughable that building Facebook required tuning web server software, let alone building entire data centers. The other layers of the stack will be abstracted away entirely and writing software will continue to look more like assembling a collection of Github-hosted libraries and APIs.
[...]
But we are getting there, and software is eating software development. The foundation of open source based software platforms, infrastructure, knowledge and best practices continues to grow. I bet Stackoverflow alone has increased programming productivity by a few percentage points. Now add fifteen years of free or inexpensive developer tools (Github, too many IDEs to list), automated infrastructure (Mesosphere, AWS, Google App Engine, Heroku, DigitalOcean and more), databases (MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Firebase and more), high level languages (Python, Ruby, PHP and more) and frameworks (Meteor, Angular, Django, Rails, Bootstrap and more): the faucets, pipes and water pumps of programming. All rooted in open source and all removing levels of detail that a creator making software for users shouldn’t have to care about.
Software engineering is not yet plumbing — or Legos — because our standards are incomplete, our libraries incompatible, scaling is still not free and our software still buggy.
Now, what does this mean for the 10x engineer? The “10x engineer” is still needed to build the foundation — building AWS or Mesos remains very difficult. But as we build out the common foundation, the skill and experience an individual needs to accomplish a task on top of the platform decreases.
More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment